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Software

jQuery 1.8.2 Released – The jQuery Team announce the release of jQuery 1.8.2, a bugfix and performance regression fix release. As usual the files are available from the jQuery site, and should be making their way to the various content delivery networks.

IE 9.0.10 Available via Windows Update – The Internet Explorer Team have released a high importance security patch for Internet Explorer 9 to address recently reported security issues. Additionally there is an update for Internet Explorer 10 to address a Adobe Flash issue.

await is not ALWAYS your friend – (Looks like the author has removed this post on MSDN, but it can be found here – thanks to @westleyl for letting me know) Julien Dollon discusses how, as with all things, you should use async/await in a responsible fashion to avoid harming your applications performance.

IlPad – icemanind shares a neat looking utility for taking C# and compiling it to IL, providing a useful reference for dynamic compiling (and decompiling to IL), and also a way of learning more about the IL that underpins language constructs.

It’s been quite a while since the last ‘Afternoon Tea’ post, and there have been quite a lot of significant announcements in the past few weeks, coupled with my being busy at work which has resulted in me building up quite a backlog of links which I really wanted to include in a Morning Brew. This post is my attempt to ‘clear the decks’ and get caught up again, and also provides the perfect excuse to do a link roundup of DDD South West which I had the pleasure of presenting at at the end of last month.

Software

Introducing jQuery++ – Justin B Meyer and the folsk over at Bitovi announce the release of jQuery++, a collection of DOM helpers which complement and extend jQuery

Bundler.NET – Bundler.NET brings the CSS and JavaScript minification and combining features of .NET 4.5 to earlier versions of .NET. The installation is simple via a NuGet package and the API reflects the .NET 4.5 implementation.

bddify is moved to GitHub and is renamed to TestStack.BDDfy – Mehdi Khalili gives an update on TestStack.BDDfy, the project formerly known as bddify, discussing the name change, and change to the projects hosting, along with looking at the structure of the NuGet packages which amke up TestStack.BDDfy.

Get latest CSS 3 support in Visual Studio 2010 – Mads Kristensen discusses how you can get the latest version of the CSS3 support into your Visual Studio 2010 installation providing a link to the schema files required and giving instructions on getting it setup and installed in Visual Studio 2010

Tree Surgeon – Alive and Kicking or Dead and Buried? – Bil Simser gives an update on an old tool that I used to make considerable use of in the past. Tree Surgeon was a tool to create a standardized format of Development Source Tree structure. In this post Bil discusses how the landscape of .NET development has changed in the 4 years since its last release with improvements in T4 Templating and NuGet, and questions if there is a future for the project.

Introducing RabbitBus – Derek Greer introduces RabbitBus, a .NET client API implementation for working with RabbitMQ, aiming to provide constructs which are not provided in the standard RabbitMQ .NET client. The library is open source with code available on GitHub, and the installation is available in NuGet package format.

AspectMap – Part 2 – An Exception Handling Helper – Chris Surfleet continues his discussions of his AspectMap AOP framework which builds upon StructureMap. In this post Chris takes a look at building a generic exception handler which can be applied to your code.

My Take on Unit Testing Private Methods – Peter Provost discusses the common questions which surround unit testing of private methods, and discusses how just because a class or method is public it isn’t automatically part of your official public API.

Setup Improvements for Visual Studio – David Guyer of the Visual Studio Team discusses the significant improvements made to the setup experience and performance in the latest Visual Studio 2012 Release

Writing a WCF 4.5 WebSocket Service – Peter Vogel has been exploring the use of Web Sockets in WCF 4.5 in a series of articles for Visual Studio Magazine. In this latest part he discusses the opening and handling of WebSocket connections

Make Web Development Easier with IIS Express – Tim Corey gives a nice introduction into working with the IIS Express Web Server for your development web server needs, looking a the different ways it can be used and configured.

DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South-West 4.0

DDD Southwest – Dan Maharry provides a nice overview of the DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper South West Conference from the end of last month. Dan also shares a collection of write ups of the sessions he attended (including mine on WebSockets and SignalR)

Information

Running Open Source In A Distributed World – Phil Haack discusses distributed Open Source projects, drawing on the wisdom of Karl Fogel’s book ‘Producing Open Source Software – How to Run a Successful Free Software Project’ and discussing the processes to become a core committer on a project, illustrating with the NuPack Project

Adopt an Open Source Project – Rob Conery attempts to convince Microsoft (and other large .NET Dependent organisations) to allow their Developer Platform Evangelists to work part time on Open Source Projects

.NET Formatting Reference Sheet – Richard Carr of BlackWasp Software shares a Reference Sheet for the multitude of string format specifiers, showing each with a description and a sample of its output.

Dependency Injection for Filters in MVC3 – Javier G. Lozano looks at using the improvements in ASP.NET MVC 3 for Dependency Injection, and how this helps make using Dependency Injection with Filter Attributes much easier.

A Simple Wrapper To Make Things More Fluent – John Sonmez continues looking at using wrapping methods with logging (or other cross cutting concerns) and explores creating a fluent-like interface for adding this functionality.

When Intel’s Hyper Threading goes bad – Paulo Reichert discusses an instance where having a Hyper-threaded CPU may not make as much difference to your performance as you might thing, looking at what hyper-threading actually means, and how it trick the operating system into running more threads than might be optimal.

7 Freely available E-Books/Guides I found essential for .NET Programmers and Architects – ‘nikosangr’ shares links to 7 really good resources for .NET Developers. I think all of these have been mentioned here before, however all are so good they deserve at least another mention.UPDATE: Turns out this link was to a complete copy of another bloggers article. The original (which was included in The Morning Brew previously) can be found here

Community

PDC UK – do you fancy a night in with the Microsoft evangelists? – Rachel Collier highlights an event with a difference to be held at Microsoft’s Reading Offices during PDC. On the evening of the 28th and 29th of October you can gather at Microsoft’s Reading HQ to join UK Evangelists to watch live streams of the PDC sessions. Registration is required

PDC10 at a university near you. – Phil Cross highlights a similar opportunity for UK Students at a number of Universities around the UK where you can see the Keynotes live, and participate in local Q&A

Software

ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2 – Phil Haack announces the release of ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview 2. New additions in this preview release include jQuery Validation support for client side validation, Areas allowing you to divide up your project more easily, model validation providers and metadata providers allowing you to support validation and metadata based on something other than the default of Data Annotations. This release is for VS2008 / .NET 3.5 Sp1 only.

CruiseControl.NET 1.5.0 CTP Released – CruiseControl.NET – Confluence – The Cruise Control Team announce the release of the Cruise Control 1.5 CTP. This release contains a number of bug fixes, a new range of security settings to allow you to lock down control of the build server, support for a number of new source code control tools such as Git, Mercurial, etc and a number of new tasks.publishers. Looks good, but as its a CTP not recommended for production use

Information

New features in ASP.NET MVC 2 Preview – ‘Shaans’ explores a number of the new features of the latest preview release of ASP.NET MVC 2, including some sneak peeks at the VS2010 beta 2 version. UPDATE: This appears to be an extract from the MVC release notes available in full here in MSWord Format

Code Contracts Preview: PostConditions – Dino Esposito continues his series over at DotNetSlackers looking at the Code Contracts Functionality, and in this article looks at PostConditions, looking at how they are implemented and how they work, along with comparing them to the use of asserts

An Engineer’s Guide to Bandwidth (Yahoo! Developer Network Blog) – Carlos Bueno, a software engineer on the Yahoo Mail project has written a good article looking at network bandwidth with a particular slant for developers. I always feel it is important to understand the process between your code and yor users, and this article seems to fill in a number of those gaps

Generically Constraining F# – Part III – Matthew Podwysocki continues his series of posts on Generic Constraints in F#. This part continues on from the previous looking at the remaining constraints that exists, including Constructor, Delegate and Reference constraints.

Strive for Functional Cohesion – Chris Eargle talks about Functional Cohesion, and the important decision developers are making all the time about where to place certain functionality in your object mode.

This will be the last of the late editions for a while, my summer break is over and its back to work for me tomorrow so The Morning Brew should be returning to its more usual 8-8:30am (UK) publishing time.

Software

Spec# and Boogie Released on CodePlex – Matthew Podwysocki highlights the release of Spec# and Boogie on CodePlex under the Microsoft Research Shared Source License Agreement (MSR-SSLA) and Microsoft Public License (MS-PL) respectivly.

Parallel Extensions and I/O – ‘dashih’ looks into using the Parallel extensions to provide parallelism in IO operations, along with highlighting some of the things you have to consider around thread safety.

Exceptions: The Airbags of Code – Joey deVilla talks about Exceptions, looking at the common division by zero example, and argues that exceptions should not be considered a catch all, and that defensive programming should be used in the first instance, with the exceptions being the last resort. Some good comments on this post too.

Analyzing AutoMapper performance – Jimmy Bogard looks at the performance of his AutoMapper project, and talks about the optimizations performed to make the times more respectable.

Coding4Fun : Todo: You stuff on your desktop – Clint Rutkas runs through the creation of a simple WPF based To-Do list manager project as a part of the Coding4Fun series – full source and binary of the project are available

Using Reflection to enforce your conventions – Derik Whittaker talks about how he used reflection to verify that all his cross process boundary types had a Serializable attribute applied, by using the naming convention, allowing these classes to be identified before runtime.

Community

Microsoft PDC09 – Microsoft PDC 2009 to be held in LA is now accepting registrations, and until 15th September will be offering a $500 discount

Last night I gave a presentation to the Liverpool Geekup group about NHibernate, thanks to everyone who came along – you were all a very nice audience. The slides from the presentation entitled Getting a Good Nights Sleep – ORM with NHibernate are available as a PDF, here. There are a number of links in the slides, but here is a more comprehensive list of links that people may find useful or interesting